Ocean View

345 Randolph St, San Francisco, CA 94132

Comprising the neighborhoods of Ocean View, Ingleside Terrace, and Merced Heights, this area is known collectively as “the OMI” by locals. Despite their close association and proximity, however, the OMI neighborhoods have different histories. For much of the nineteenth century, Ocean View was known as Farmland; it grew up around the Southern Pacific Railroad but failed to attract a large number of residents until after the 1906 earthquake, when it became a largely working-class neighborhood of German, Swedish, and Irish immigrants. Merced Heights, located on a hill between Ocean View and Ingleside, was slower to develop and had only a handful of homes before World War II. North, the grid street design gives way to a loop with over 750 houses that were built as part of a “residential park” of the Ingleside Terrace neighborhood to attract well-heeled buyers.

Not visible on the model is the Ingleside Racetrack, a popular destination for monied San Franciscans, who gathered there to watch and bet on horses from 1895 to 1905. (Present-day Urbano Drive follows the course of the one-mile oval racetrack.) Also not apparent is the neighborhood’s complex racial and ethnic history. For many years, it systematically excluded people of color through deed restrictions. Ingleside Terrace was off limits to minorities until 1957, when Cecil F. Poole, an African American attorney, bought the house at 90 Cedro Avenue, where he lived until the 1980s. However, many black families who moved west in the Great Migration were able to purchase homes in Merced Heights, which became a middle-class neighborhood. And today, the area is incredibly diverse: more than half the population of Ocean View is Asian, and black and Latino communities continue to flourish here.